Laurence Rosen, who founded temp agency Office Angels in 1986, yesterday welcomed the government plans for share options schemes as "wonderful". Mr Rosen, whose new company Huntress Search, a net-based recruitment agency began trading this week, said yesterday's changes will make it easier to hire staff.

Mr Rosen plans to hire about 150 employees over the next 12 months. Amid growing labour shortages, especially in IT, share options are becoming essential to the package used by start-ups to lure skilled workers. Until yesterday, Huntress was restrained by limits on start-up option schemes which allow the tax-privileged benefits to be given to only 15 employees. But Huntress, which started trading with 43 staff, already exceeded the ceiling.

Mr Rosen, the company's chief executive, said: "For a start-up company, there is no question that offering a share of the business's success through options is a very attractive incentive indeed. We have been able to offer the scheme to 15 staff, and the prospect of extending it to more is wonderful news for me and for other start-ups."

Huntress plans to expand to around 200 staff over the next 12 months, and Mr Rosen says it hopes to float on the stock market within three or four years, partly to give an exit route for backers such as Foreign & Colonial, which has invested £5m. If a float is successful, the staff's share options would become highly valuable, because the gain made on the sale of the options will be free of income tax, and suffer capital gains tax of just 10%.

Mr Rosen says share option packages are sought after despite the meltdown in technology stock values since the dot.com boom earlier this year. "The idea of options has taken a bit of a battering: there's not much point in having one million options issued at 20p and then find they are only worth 1p. But people are not fools; they know how the stock market works and they still believe in options, especially over the medium term."